Mock Severity

I remember asking an adult if God can make 2 + 2 = 5 when I was 8.  “How could God possibility do that?” I asked.  I’ve since come to the conclusion that, no, God cannot make 2 + 2 = 5.  The thought has received a lot of intellectual discussion though, and it draws out some interesting confusions:

From “Impossible Omnipotence” by Mike Almeida over at Prosblogion:

Many students think that anything that is omnipotent could make 2+2 = 5 or create a round-square, or square-circle or the like. Now these sorts of claims are often dismissed as naive or not well thought out since they amount to the claim that an omnipotent being could do the impossible.

I’m now less sanguine about this sort of response, though I’ve given it before. I don’t think that students or others who claim that an omnipotent being could create a round-square are in fact claiming that an omnipotent being could do the impossible. What they are claiming, I think, is that round-squares would not be impossible were there omnipotent beings or the state of affairs that p & ~p would not be impossible were there an omnipotent being.

It seems like Mike is saying that any “omnipotent being” could do anything, including those things which are inherently contradictory.

But, what kind of “inability” is it to be unable to build a statue of David and not build a statue of David at the same time?  Is such an inability incapable of something?  Ok, enough rhetorical questions:

Lets suppose that W represents the quality of being a round square.  Any being with such a quality has W-ness.  Is it necessary that God could create something with W-ness in order to have omnipotence?

Nothing could ever have W-ness.  Therefore, W-ness is no thing.  Since God has the quality of being capable of creating all things, he is omnipotent despite being unable to create something with W-ness.  Again, this is because W-ness is no thing since nothing could possibly have W-ness.

A related problem comes up later in his post.  It is best discussed in this comment:

Fascinating discussion; it reminds me of disputes about Descartes’s position on eternal truths. Descartes would agree enthusiastically with the claim that what is impossible is impossible, and what is necessary is necessary, because God wills it to be — and due to omnipotence he could have willed otherwise:

“…God cannot have been determined to make it true that contradictories cannot be true together, and tehrefore…he could have done the opposite….And even if God has willed that some truths should be necessary, this does not mean that he willed them necessarily; for it is one thing to will that they be necessary, and quite another to will this necessarily, or to be necessitated to will it.” (AT IV, 118; CSMK 235)

According to Descartes, God could have willed otherwise in cases of necessity.  It is necessary that 2 + 2 = 4, but God could have willed otherwise.  He could have made it 5 or 6.  Since everything is merely as God willed it, including cases of necessity, then 2 + 2 could have equaled π.

But, wait a second.  This is absurd.  Every time a couple and another couple formed a group together, they could have had π total people in their group, if only God had willed it necessary?  That seems ridiculous.  It sounds like the punch line to a reductio ad absurdum argument.

I’ve run out of clever arguments.  Necessary means it could never have been any other way.  And it is necessary that 2 + 2 = 4.  Does anyone have any plausible arguments which refute this?  Descartes was happy, at least in the passage quoted above, to merely assert that it is false.  I want to ask “What coherent conception of reality allows for Descartes’s position?” but coherent usually entails non-contradictory.  And Descartes is allowing God to have had the power to make contradictions true.

This edition of Philosopher’s Carnival is brought to you by the letter “C” and my cheesy humor.  First person to leave a comment explaining why titled this post “Philosopher’s Carnival C” gets extra brownie points.

On to more serious business, I was genuinely surprised at the quality and level of thinking displayed in these blogs!  Make the time to deeply think about each link; there is depth and insight in each one.

The Unique and the Random

Clayton Littlejohn wrote an wonderfully complex and intellectually stimulating discussion on normative judgments in his post “Justified Normative Judgments” at PEA Soup.  The discussion in the comments is particularly insightful, mostly because of the fascinating issues Clayton brings up.  e.g. “Should your conscience be your guide?”

I love philosophy humor, so it tickled my fancy when Chaospet submitted “Table for one.. or two?” A wrench is thrown into the idea that personhood begins at conception; hilarity ensues.

Now for a sharp left turn: Do we understand others by replicating their mental states?  The role and function of mirror neurons has philosophic import to many theories of human cognition.  These thoughts are pursued by Shannon Spaulding at the philosophyofbrains.com blog in her post “Are mirror neurons evidence for simulation theory?”

Meta Philosophy

Chris Hallquist writes in “How agnostic are you willing to be?” on how confident philosophers should be in light of our widespread disagreement.  In order to fully appreciate this post, read through the Phil Papers survey questions posted at the bottom of this Philosopher’s Carnival.  If you understand what each question is asking, congratulations!  You are a philosopher.

Chris Hoover over at Living via Cognition wrote about the value of exact thinking in the post “People Who Use “Extravagant” Language” and I wrote “The Unwashed Masses Have a Point” in response.   It’s meta-Philosophy for the people who like to think about thinking.

Political Theory

Continuing the thread from the previous section, Aaron Powell writes about political meta-philosophy in “Communitarianism’s Fatal Misconception.” What are we to do with fundamental disagreement in political thinking?  Aaron tackles this question in order to properly understand what he describes as Communitarianism’s fatal misconception.

Joachim considers Panpsychism in some versions of Marxist theory.  In other words: is everything that exists an experience?  Does everything that exists experience?  Jachim makes sense of these thoughts in the context of Marxist thinking in “Panpsychic Marxism?”

Consider the following “There are rational paradoxes (e.g. hedonic paradoxes) whereby achieving an end A is hindered by actively pursuing A (or A only) and can instead be achieved by instead/also pursuing end B or cultivating disposition C.”  This is exactly what Murali defends over at A Singaporean Renaissance in the post “Two Types of reasons: Prisoner’s Dilemma and the categorical imperative revisited”

Phil Papers survey questions:

A priori knowledge: yes or no?
Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism?
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective?
Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no?
Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism?
Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will?
God: theism or atheism?
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism?
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism?
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism?
Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean?
Logic: classical or non-classical?
Mental content: internalism or externalism?
Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism?
Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism?
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism?
Moral motivation: internalism or externalism?
Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism?
Newcomb’s problem: one box or two boxes?
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics?
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory?
Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view?
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism?
Proper names: Fregean or Millian?
Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism?
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death?
Time: A-theory or B-theory?
Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): switch or don’t switch?
Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic?
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible?

Fellow philosopher in training Chris Hoover wrote about the benefits of having a large, well understood vocabulary on his blog, Living Via Cognition.  I wrote out a detailed reply to his post only to lose it by naviagate away from his page.  Thinking about what I wrote the first time, and re-reading his post made me think a bit deeper about what he is responding to.

First, consider the quote Chris was responding too:

“Hegel wrote in his essay “Who Thinks Abstractly?” that it is not the philosopher who thinks abstractly but the person on the street, who uses concepts as fixed, unchangeable givens, without any context. It is the philosopher who thinks concretely, because he goes beyond the limits of everyday concepts to understand their broader context. This makes philosophical thought and language seem mysterious or obscure to the person on the street.”

As this quote on Hegel points out, the philistine think less concretely than the sophisticated.  The “person on the street”, who lacks a philosophers subtle conceptual understanding of the world, approaches language in a dogmatic fashion.  For these people, words have strict “meanings” which are ironcally imprecise.

The title of Hegel’s essay, “Who Thinks Abstractly”, baffled me at first.  His thesis is that it is the unsophisticated who think abstractly, not philosophers.  At first blush, that is ridiculous.  If anyone thinks abstractly, philosophers do.  It is the philosopher who writes about the nature of necessity, not the philistine.

But a more charitable interpretation of “concrete” and “abstract” gets at Hegel’s point – the “person on the street” uses language in a way that requires much interpretation, while the philosopher is at his best when he writes lucid prose with a clear and definite meaning.  Here, concrete means reliable rather than tangibale; abstract means indefinite rather than conceptual.

Chris analyzes the quote a bit differently than me.  His two interpretaions explicate the kind of mistakes often made by the “person on the street”.  I have no problem with either of them.

Second, what is motivating this discussion?

Although he approaches the discussion through the lense of Hegel and Heidegger, it seems clear to me that what is at stake here is the value of making subtle distinctions.  As he points out, Heidegger and many philosophers like him spend huge amounts of time distinguishing between the different possible interpretations of any concept discussed.  The quote about Hegel’s essay “Who Thinks Abstractly” provides us with good reason for doing such work when thinking about the world.

Despite the fact that I agree with Chris, there is a point of view being ignored here.  From a pratical standpoint, many people get pissed off at philosophers when they make fine distinctions.  People sometimes catagorize philosophy majors as arrogant or a bunch of smart-asses, and this isn’t mere envy.  People who are stuck in pratical concerns day in and day out are not pleased when philosophers start questioning the meaning behind there job, or when they try to understand the exact nature of their work.

When a philosopher responds to what is typically taken as a straight-forward question with a fivefold distinction, normal people will get hostile.  Although Hegel has a point when he says the unsophisticated don’t fully know what they mean, ordinary people can easily retort that philosophers do not know anything at all.  And if the topic of discussion is typical day to day stuff, they have a point.

I am much more Hegel than Philistine.  I’m more likely to piss people off with fivefold distinctions than say something I don’t fully understand.  But those who do get pissed off sometimes do have a point – it isn’t always time for philosohpy.

John Bigler was the governor of California from 1852 to 1856, and gave a speech on April 1852 urging the state congress to pass laws to restrict Chinese Immigration.  As an expression of philosophy, it shows the emphases on race that was prevalent in American thinking at the time.  It is no coincidence that during this time America developed a firm us (free white persons) versus them (non-white foreigners) dichotomy for dealing with unnaturalized persons living in America. In support of this view, Bigler pushes the idea that Chinese immigration is exposing the nation’s resources to foreign interests, which is only reasonable if we accept his assertions that the Chinese were mere indentured laborers without any capacity or intention of becoming good American citizens.  Time has obviously judged such pronouncements as grossly inaccurate, and it is worthwhile to consider what generated such counterfactual thoughts.

The idea that only free white persons can be trusted was clearly in currency with Californian politicians.  It was extremely short sighted, but still reasonable to expect from the time period.  The white settlers of America were jockeying for position among European countries; expansion, cultural pride, and independence of white America were all evident in American politics – America was a nation struggling to prove itself in the newly emerging global community.  The us versus them mentality solidified because of the American identity, not in spite of it.

In “Notes on the State of Virginia”, Jefferson supports the racist attitudes of the country by appealing to the observable criteria of culture.  Jefferson extends the example of judging “horses, dogs, and other domestic animals” by the criteria of beauty to human beings in order to legitimize his view that observational differences between blacks and whites show the white race to be superior.  This superiority justified “free white persons” in treating non-whites as untrustworthy.

The predisposition toward eurocentricity in 19th century America is best understood as a vehicle for the American ego, rather than as a result of observable intents and characteristics in non-whites.  In forging a distinct American identity, I believe it was inevitable that such an us versus them dichotomy would develop.  This view of racist attitudes gives strong evidence of a bias in white politicians to see and generalize all Chinese immigrants as being mere indentured servants.  If all these hard working, wage reducing Chinese were forced to be in America and mine California gold on behalf of foreign interests, then it would give America very good reason to bar, or at least limit, Chinese immigration.  As Bigler put it, “numbers of Asiatics have been and are being sent here, under contracts to labor for a term of years in our mines at merely nominal wages, and their families have been retained as hostages for the faithful performances of the contracts.”  Such people would have few reasons for loyalty to America, and very good reasons, like the safety of their families, to extradite American resources to China.

I don’t believe that the people who passed laws similar to those proposed by Bigler cared about the racial climate they were creating.  Some of them may or may not have been aware of the deepening racist tendencies, but on the whole I think they felt indifferent toward non-whites.  It appears that the more important issue for them was the interest and welfare of their country.  The supposed founding ideals of America – upholding the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the words of Jefferson – appear to me as being mere rhetorical devices, made to disguise selfish motives.  While hardly universal among Americans, something closer to a true founding ideal might be rational self-interest, the promotion of white male power above all else.  It would certainly explain the political actions of early America better than the promotion of humanity’s right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.